A student taking part in the new series of the Great British Bake Off says he taught himself to bake after “stumbling across a YouTube video”.
When Mo Mahir, 22, from West Bromwich, was nine years old, he “found a video of a guy making a mug cake in a microwave”, which he said ignited his passion for baking.
“I feel like as a Bengali, we don’t really have a lot of cakes or baking in our cultural background,” he said. “It started with me mixing a bunch of random stuff. My mum used to always be shouting at me saying ‘stop, that’s making a mess’.”
As part of the Channel 4 series, Mahir, a student at Birmingham City University, has been competing against 12 other bakers.
“Growing up, I’ve always loved cakes and cookies and stuff and I’ve always wanted to eat them, but it’s just that we never always got the, like, freshly baked stuff. So I kind of had to teach myself,” he said.
“Nothing turned out right because I wasn’t measuring anything, but it slowly just progressed from there.”
